What I Wish I’d Known Then…

Jessie Gruman of the Center for Advancing Health is running a blog series on lessons learned about the unique needs and responsibilities of those who have been diagnosed and treated for cancer. The series explores what it takes to find the right health care and make the most of it as part of our efforts to live as well and as long as we can.

I am pleased to be have been able to contribute a piece on a topic very important to me – the effect of breast cancer on fertility.

On the subject of fertility, something I wish I’d known ‘then’ was about IVM. This is a sort of IVF that doesn’t involve any hormones. The success rate used to be 1/10, but I think it’s since gone up a bit. Okay, so the odds are yet to be awesome – BUT – a hormone free option seems rather epically important to a woman diagnosed with estrogen receptive cancer. The process itself only takes a couple days so it doesn’t even get in the way of treatment.

Other options is having the ovary removed and frozen, then later reinserted, or having a biopsy of the ovary. There’s even a method now where they remove the ovary, freeze it, and may (in the future) be able to extract eggs on the lab bench.

Unfortunately, these options become far less likely to succeed post chemotherapy. It’s a bit heartbreaking.

Very good piece, Marie. I wish I had been urged, no, commanded, to have a mastectomy rather than a lumpectomy and radiation when I first found my lump in 1996. That alone would have been likely to have extended my life over what it will now be. But we can’t change the past. I forge ahead, trying to help other women through this quagmire that is breast cancer. xo

". . .and the world cannot be discovered by a journey of miles, no matter how long, but only by a spiritual journey, a journey of one inch, very arduous and humbling and JOYFUL, by which we arrive at the ground at our own feet, and learn to be at home."
Wendell Berry